Well, it's not just the private sector filling a need that is the problem. It's the use of public money (vouchers) without accountability (per step (b) above). I figure they (founders) would be smart enough to see the problem with that. If they weren't taking public money, they can probably do whatever the heck they want, but as soon as they do, they should be accountable to the taxpayers. There is probably large overlap between folks who don't want SNAP beneficiaries buying sodas and folks who bristle at auditing/regulation of schools taking vouchers.

Sigh. This math is not hard.
  Made up numbers to illustrate the possible math.
population: 1,000,000
#with cancer: 1,000
#with cancer who also has alz: 20
#with alz in general population: 2220

% of entire population with alz: 2240/1000000 = 2.24%
% of cancer patients with alz: 20/1000 = 2.00%
=>Cancer patients have 2/2.24 = 0.89, 100-89 = 11% fewer incidence of alz than the general population.
% of population with both: 20/1000000 = 0.02% => I would call this rare.

>How about enforcing the existing laws?
Yeah, about that. What the current administration is doing is just about the worst, most inefficient, most disruptive way to do that. If they were ACTUALLY interested in enforcing the laws, they would be going after the illegal EMPLOYERs. Fine the hell out of them and make examples. There should be headlines every week of Company XYZ getting raided, the CEO being handcuffed and perpwalked. The jobs will dry up and there will no longer be any incentives for the illegal workers to come in. The fact that many of those rural legislators who are loudest about immigration are themselves employers of undocumented workers (and Trump himself, too!), and there have been no public arrest/fining of illegal employers is a pretty sure sign that they're not interested in actually solving the "problem", but are just going through the motions to get suckers to go along with their agenda. If you are serious about enforcement, you should be calling for the administrations to go after those illegal employers. Those MAGA legislators should be writing up tougher regulations on illegal hiring and auditing frameworks. Are they doing any of that? What happened to government efficiency that they were harping about?

>previous administration refused to do
I keep seeing this from the same suckers that fall for the prior point, but they never present the evidence. What I've read showed that enforcement/deportations were still happening under Biden. They didn't make a show of the cruelty and violation of due process, though, so perhaps it wasn't nearly as visible. Proper enforcement requires resources, and like any large organization, the government has to evaluate the cost/benefit and allocate those resources appropriately. Given that undocumented workers overall are a net positive for the U.S. economy/treasury, spending huge amounts of money to stop it has to have some other upside. Based on reality/actual data, I'd rather government prioritize other things than brutal crackdowns that harm citizens and legal residents. Don't bring up crime -- outside the senile mind of Trump and his minions, immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than the native population. Hence, statistically, more immigrants lead to lower crime rate.

Lots of MAGAs seem to have issues with asylum seekers. Faux news whining aside, asylum is a LEGAL process. Asylum seekers are by definition NOT illegal. If they don't like it, the administration can properly fund the process to get through all the backlog and vet the applicants. If they don't like the fact that there are asylum seekers at all, they have control of congress. Pass the laws necessary to extricate the US from various treaties that obligate us to accept asylum. They're not doing that, though, because that would remove another talking point if there were no more asylum seekers to demonize and beat up. Instead, they are nabbing people at the appointments and court hearings while at the same time saying that they should have done it the "right way".

I don't know about "couldn't" do, but it's pretty obvious with the cutting of CDC and government agencies that they aren't willing to do it going forward. If I'm not mixing things up, part of WHO is surveillance. Member countries share information about outbreaks and coordinate response. It's one of the ways we know about some nasty ebola mutation in the ass end of Africa before it actually makes it into the U.S. Since it at least maintains some legitimacy on the world stage, it has access to hostile regions and governments where U.S. officials would not be allowed direct access otherwise.

Infectious diseases is one of the rare cases where nipping things in the bud in foreign countries is very much cost effective. If a U.S. lead WHO team stops some disease in a remote village by inoculating everyone before it spreads to the world (and hence, the U.S.), it would have paid for itself literally millions of times over, as well as earning prestige and 'soft power' for the U.S.

To replicate this would require the U.S. to have surveillance teams in every country. In addition to not having access to some countries, this would probably cost more than the WHO membership. Humans work better when they cooperate. One of the critiques for the Trump admin was that it dismantled one of the surveillance teams that would have given us a leg up on COVID if it were still there.

One of the reasons SARS-COV-19 was the "big pandemic" because the original SARS (2002?) wasn't. Aside from being less contagious, there was a coordinated response partially thanks to WHO that kept it from spreading.

Coordinated surveillance and response is one of the best weapons humanity has against infectious diseases. The U.S. with its resources is best equipped to contribute to and benefit from it. Pretending that it's now someone else's problem seems very short sighted. Infectious diseases don't care about borders.

And just because I've seen some MAGA morons blurt some garbage about illegals bringing in diseases, there is lot more travel than immigration. Unless U.S. goes full closed borders like the old USSR and restrict travel for its own residents, there's plenty of vectors for infections to come in.

One reason she lost was she and her party weren't willing to lie through the teeth nearly as much as the opposition, and gave too much credit to the electorate in their ability see through very transparent lies, and hold them accountable for those lies. To repeat an analogy I've used before, if nVidia wins on sales by cheating on the benchmarks and colluding with "influencers" to publish false performance metrics, it does not mean AMD was "terrible". You are drawing false inference from the election results.

"how terrible Kamala was" should more accurately be rendered as "how terrible the fictional caricature of Harris was that was painted by the billionaire-funded right wing propaganda machine, which was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the ignorant." If one actually looks at the track record of Democratic administrations through Clinton, Obama, Biden... the world didn't end. The US kept its prominent position in the world. You still have your guns; they weren't taken away. Statistically, there was market growth, job growth, and even deficit reduction in some cases. Perhaps the little guy still suffered during all this time, but the issue was not limited to Dems. The whole "trickle down" BS was Reagan, after all, and to think that the guy who is laughing with the billionaires about firing striking workers would actually be any better for the little guy is laughable. "This candidate may not do enough for my interests, so I'll vote for the guy who demonstrably will work against my interests." is very, very stupid.

One example: "bring prices down on day one." Anyone with any clue knows the president does not have the power to make this happen. If it were accompanied with any sort of plausible plans/policies, maybe it could be forgiven as political hyperbole, but no, all he had were tariffs, which would have the opposite effect.

Another one: "Trump is for the American worker" -- one of the first things the administration did was dismantle the labor relations board so that there is no place to take labor complaints and grievances. As people are finding out now, the "no tax on tips/overtime" was so narrowly defined that almost no one benefits from it, (Congratulations if you were able to slip through that crack) and it expires in a few years, whereas the huge tax cuts for the billionaires is permanent.

Demonization of immigrants, despite that any statistic that is collected indicates immigrants commit fewer crimes than native population. Undocumented workers also are net positive to the US treasury due to the fact that most of them pay taxes (have TINs) but can't collect any of the benefits (don't have SSNs). [ICE using tax records to track down immigrants to arrest should be a clue.] This will exacerbate the revenue shortfall caused by the tax cuts.

Admittedly, Harris didn't seem to bring anything spectacular to the table, but anyone with any sense would see that the status quo is much preferable to the active destruction of the position and prestige the US has built up since WW2. The bumpy ride that I had predicted over the years is finally here.

Yeah, because shooting the driver of a moving vehicle immediately brings the car to a dead stop. Well actually it doesn't.

At the distance involved, there was no logical way shooting the driver would have helped. It seems folks are trying to argue that a driver who got shot will immediately move her foot from the accelerator to the brake pedal and do it quickly enough to matter. I simply cannot grasp the idiocy needed to hold this position. The most logical thing (and per law enforcement policy, as far as folks posted online and I have not seen refuted) would be to step out of the car's way, which he did. Since he could have and did step out of the car's way, that is pretty much all the proof needed to show that the shooting was not justified. This is aside from all the other procedural issues with what the guy did. [should never have been in front of the car to begin with; the stop itself was outside the jurisdiction of ICE; driver was demonstratively not blocking traffic as evidenced by the other cars passing before the ICE truck.]

Only time it makes sense to shoot the driver would be if there were enough time and distance such that disabling the driver is necessary to keep them from steering actively towards you while you got away. There was simply not enough distance for any of that to matter in this situation; shooting the driver can not meaningfully change the trajectory of the car in 1-2 meters.

Note that just because immediate execution was not justified does not mean that the driver was necessarily innocent. It's simply statement that if she were guilty of anything, she can be picked up later and face the music through appropriate due process. They already had her plates. Sane people don't want to live in a country where barely literate goons get to be judge, jury, and executioner on the spot.

Except for the doctored AI footage uploaded by some pot-stirring jerk, all the footage shows the guy was not in the path of the car at the time of the first shot. At worst, he got brushed by the mirror as it went past. Even if somehow you went through the twisted illogic needed to justify the first shot, the second and third shots were completely unnecessary. Any competent Law Enforcement Agency would investigate and discipline him for those. Denying medical care after the fact was also unnecessary and unethical if not illegal.

Not holding LEOs accountable for obvious misbehavior makes us all less safe. Stop encouraging such behavior.

>DJT made a better pitch

The issue I have with is that a lot of the sales pitch was a bald-faced lie that anyone with a grade-school education and life experience should have seen through. For example, a president does not have a "grocery price" knob in the oval office that he can just turn down on day one. Even if you interpret it generously as "will start implementing policies that will bring down consumer prices," none of that was detailed. In fact, the main talking point about tariffs would obviously have the opposite effect. Anyone with any clue would see tariffs as taxes on the American public, but he kept saying "other countries" pay the tariffs, another bald-faced lie. The guy can't go 2 complete sentences (if he actually manages to form them) without tossing in a lie.

Bring it back to /. appropriate analogy: If Intel colluded with PC publications and "influencers" to publish false benchmarks that show it to be better than AMD, and this lead to strong initial sales of a new processor compared to AMD's offering, does that really indicate that that's what consumers wanted? Is it fair to point to those sales numbers to say "see, Intel is more popular, it must be because it's better!" Is the correct solution to also have AMD lie so it's "fair"?

According to polling, it appears that there is significant buyer's remorse going on. What's depressing is that we already got a "test drive" 5-8 years ago. How many of those farmers who needed a bailout last time thought, "hey, we need more of that!" How about those union workers who saw Trump laughing with a billionaire about firing striking workers? Did they really think, "hey, that's him looking out for the little guy!" The mind still boggles at the amount of stupidity/willful ignorance to RE-elect this guy after plenty of examples of him acting directly against the interests of large portions of the population, in addition to being malicious, ignorant, and a general creep.

I do see that the Democrats didn't have "flashy" messaging. I'm not sure what they could have done against "flooding the zone" of BS. Politics, when done correctly, is (supposed to be) boring, and what we had at the end of Biden's term was boring in a good way.

I tossed this out on /. like over a decade (or two) ago. I think the responses I got were either that it's impractical somehow or that it already existed. It's too far back to find, but would it be possible to create a camera with a private key in silicon that signs every image it creates. Any attempt to read out the key from the silicon would destroy it.

The image can only be read with a public key for that specific camera, and the encryption would be embedded in the image (watermark) in such a way that any alteration of the image will destroy the encryption. I'm no an encryption guy by any means so I'm not even sure what the correct terms are. In any case, is there a way to make something like this? At least for special cameras used by police/investigators, can this be done such that it is certain that the image is unaltered after it came from a specific camera.

I also wanted full control and couldn't stand sharing anything with a third party willy nilly. Even a Pi Zero W can run motion. It will also locally store photos/videos based on detection criteria you set, so WiFi jamming isn't an issue. Pi Zero W is $10 (or it was at the time). I forgot how much the camera cost... probably less than $20. (It came with IR LEDs). SD cards are also cheap.

But I'll still take it easy and not let the sound of my own wheels drive me crazy.

That would net them 2.5 cents per transaction on average. I guess I could see that level of greed/pettiness on the part of corporate entities in this day and age, but such a small benefit would probably be drowned out by the effect of not being able to advertise a price, say, 1 cent less than their competitor. They won't get that 2.5 cents if the customer decides to go somewhere else. That, in addition to any customers who have a choice being disgusted/repelled by such pettiness and choosing someplace else to go.

I would hope any store will set up a fair rounding policy (up/down to nearest nickel, round even on exact 0.5).

There are plenty of "retroclones" out there, like OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, Dark Dungeons, etc. are just re-implementations of the various OD&D, 1st/2nd edition, Rules Cyclopedia, etc. rulesets, all downloadable.

I'm not aware of the newer stuff (3rd ed or newer, I guess they are not 'retro' enough.), but the older stuff is good enough to get the framework for interesting play.
There's also Dungeon Slayers, whose basic rules are downloadable.

In that case, though, that would be poor test prep because a good chunk of the AP test score is (was?) the speaking portion. I recall having to record several short answers and a long answer into a tape recorder. Did they get rid of that part?

I didn't want to believe it, but one wild thought is that the robots are stopgap measure to extract the last bit of wealth out of the masses before putting them out of their misery. If they had to use workers, some of it will trickle back down (horrors!) and it would be that much harder to get the very last drop. Once that's done, they don't need the masses any more.

Looking at what they're doing in the U.S. (cutting health care, cutting food assistance, putting farmers out of business and buying up their land, encouraging vaccine skepticism, cutting back environmental protections, militarizing law enforcement to send against civilians, etc. etc.) It's exactly what you would do to "cull the herd" with mass starvation, disease, and death. In the end, they can shut down most of the robots and produce just what they need.

Not sure what they intend to do with all that wealth once it's all done, though. (and once there's no economy left, what is "wealth" anyways?) I guess they'll end up controlling the empty landscape to do as they please.

IIRC, you can set any "screen saver" as a desktop background. I was doing this in the early days of OS X until the novelty wore off. One of the screen savers will display media including photos and videos, so I think that was how you could do it then. I captured a video of a mountain stream and tried to have that as a desktop. I think it worked, but at the time, the CPU load made the machine run hot and loud all the time, so it wasn't worth it.

More interesting was the Marine Aquarium screen saver. Not video, but not too bad/distracting and viable as such.